The end of the trail — or so it seemed to most Chicagoans — came on Halloween of 1999.
That was the day when Cows on Parade, the great Chicago cow craze, officially came to a close. Moving vans fanned out through downtown streets and collected the 320 fiberglass, artist-decorated cows that the previous summer had been ogled and photographed and petted and climbed on throughout the central city.
Within days the beasts were put out to pasture, some auctioned off for charity, others granted haven with their sponsors.
It was over.
Except it wasn’t.
Meet Layne Jackson and Nancy Parkinson Albrecht. You might say they are milking a trend. For a price, they will help you have a cow — and they will gussy her up any way you like.
Since the city’s display shut down, the two women have filled some 300 orders for customized cattle and other critters.
Jackson and Albrecht are fine artists by training and inclination — painters who ordinarily work on canvas. Their studios are on the same floor of the same West Loop loft building. Both had been commissioned to paint cows for the summer-long public-art project nearly two years ago.
Jackson recalls thinking, when she was first approached, that “I didn’t come here from cow country (she grew up in Dallas) to paint cows.” But she did one anyway, “Young at Heart,” which stood at the south end of Grant Park. Albrecht’s “Chi-COW-Go” was on Michigan Avenue near the Cultural Center. As one of the first to be displayed, Albrecht’s cow made the pages of the Wall Street Journal and Town and Country Magazine.
By fine-artist standards, both women were doing OK financially as the summer of cows wore on — enough gross to cover expenses, not much net afterward.
But then the two experienced a case of bovine intervention.
On Aug. 15, of cow summer, Albrecht approached Jackson with a cow small enough to sit on a desk, a cow sent to her for painting by a publicist for the project. That had given Albrecht an idea, which she presented to Jackson. “I suggested we might be able to sell painted versions of the tabletop cows,” Albrecht said. “I told her to take a day to think it over.”
“By the time she reached the door,” Jackson says, “I had said, `Yes, I’ll be your co-pilot.'”
Here’s what Jackson was thinking: “I looked at it as something to do for a few months. I figured I’d pay my debts and buy Christmas gifts.”
Neither realized that they had grabbed the tail of something big, though they soon would be getting several strong hints. They trademarked the name “Cowpainters” and set up their company, Cowpainters LLC, with production on the floor below their studios. They hired a lawyer and an accountant.
Many of the Chicago art-project cows were auctioned off, first in an online sale, later at an in-person auction Nov. 9. At that auction, Jackson and Albrecht handed out brochures announcing their new venture. The next day, the love Chicagoans felt for the cows began to reveal itself.
“We had three phones ringing for eight hours, and for months after,” Jackson said. “There was a cow frenzy.” Much of the frenzy, they were surprised to discover, quickly shifted from the desktop sizes to the full-sized, 88-pound models.
One call was for a large, painted cow needed for the 50th anniversary of the Baker & McKenzie law firm headquartered here. It was a rush job. Because it would take too long to import a blank cow from Switzerland, where all the Cows on Parade animals were from, the two artists found a domestic supplier. The cow was to be painted with scenes of the 60 cities in which the firm had a presence.
“We hired an artist friend, Nicole Gordon, to help us,” Jackson said, “and put in 200 to 300 hours on it. The research was really something. It’s easy to think of a visual symbol for Paris or Sydney, but Baku?!”
When, one day early in the business, one of them referred to it as a “small business,” the accountant corrected them. “You have suppliers, clients, people you hire, You’re not small.”
Jackson’s art-project cow initially was kept by her sponsor, Abbot Laboratories, and later auctioned to benefit the Columbus (Ohio) Children’s Hospital. It now lives(“lives” is the verb Jackson used) in that city. Albrecht’s was auctioned at the Nov. 9 sale.
“When we heard that her cow had sold for $36,000,” Jackson said, “cows started looking pretty good.”
Indeed, in about 18 months, they have been able to sell approximately 300 cows, desktop and large, along withsome 50 or 60 other animals. The final touch of the rightness of cow painting came to Jackson when she was asked to speak to a group of 11-year-olds at Highcrest Middle School in Wilmette. The kids wiggled nervously in their seats as Jackson talked about what it is like to be an artist and showed slides of her canvas paintings.
“But as soon as I put up a slide of a cow, they started applauding. They clapped for two minutes.”
The artists have a Cowpainters Web site, www.cowpainters.com, where they correctly proclaim: “You love ’em; we got ’em.” The site describes the various styles and sizes of cows, plus the more recent additions of buffalo, horses, pigs, fish, calves and ponies (the latter two are, Jackson noted, “a great size for a kitchen or a playroom”).
The creatures are sold either primed and painted white, a ready surface for your own artistic efforts, or as made-to-order, painted works. Prices range from $15 each for unpainted 6-inch figures sold in groups of 10 to $250 for unpainted table-top sizes that are about $750 painted. Big cows arrive at the studio gray and pitted. They are sanded, primed and covered with a coat of white paint. Domestic cows are beef cattle that sell, at the primed and white stage, for $2,500. The Swiss imports, the shapes seen here in the summer of ’99, are Swiss milking cows. The base price on them is $3,500. A customized paint scheme on either adds, on average, $5,000 to the cost.
Cowpainters’ most expensive work so far was “Tiled Cow.” Albrecht painted its head, neck and legs black and white, and Chicago mosaic artist Bennett Spencer covered the rest with tiles. The cow sold for $12,000. Prices are negotiable for multiple orders and for not-for-profit institutions — hospitals, charities (which auction them off) and schools.
There are nine cows and a buffalo (for Buffalo Tire and Car Care in North Carolina) in the pipeline, and the two artists are able to employ as many as 12 other artists and sculptors on a semi-regular basis to produce the creatures. Cowpainters, however, has moved well beyond cow painting. Now Albrecht and Jackson broker the unadorned creatures and have been contacted by public arts festival sponsors in places such as Waco, Texas, and Monterrey, Mexico, to consult on the fine points of staging such events. They can explain everything from hiring sculptors to create original molds for fiberglass creatures to coordinating design and shipping to advice on marketing to tips on how to get school kids involved.
If any other artists have herded up the fiberglass cow industry the way they have, Jackson and Albrecht aren’t aware of them.
They are pleased that their work has raised something like $300,000 for charities, pleased to become players in the public art arena, pleased to take on interns from nearby Best Practice High School (the name of the school as published has been corrected in this text) through the program run there by Carolyn Smith (daughter of Tribune publisher Scott Smith, a painted cow owner).
The interns not only get to work on commissioned pieces, they learn about the business side of art. “The idea that any successful artist is anything but a business person,” Jackson said, “is insane.”
Some Cowpainters interns can take pride in the fact that their work may someday be on display in a presidential library. The company was commissioned to paint a desktop cow to be presented to President Clinton. Under the paint, totally unseen in the finished work, the students wrote messages to the president.
The thing Jackson and Albrecht are perhaps most pleased about is the fact that, although it means 12-hour workdays, the cow-based business gives them the financial freedom to pursue their fine art.
Jackson notes that the dividing line between the two kinds of work sometimes is fine indeed.
“In terms of the craftsmanship, the thought and dedication that goes into them,” Jackson said, “our best cows are fine art. I’d put `Tile Cow’ up against anything anywhere.”
Both artists’ canvas works are widely shown. Jackson’s paintings are inspired by photographs of the ’30s and ’40s and can be seen beginning Feb. 16 at the Gallery on Lake/Judith Racht, 942 W. Lake St. in Chicago. Albrecht’s are of nature, including a March show in Anacortes, Wash., of tulips seen in closeup.
For Jackson, the cow business has made significant changes in her life: “I bought my first house,” she said. “I won’t have to be a corporate art director again. I won’t have to wear stockings and high heels.”
Not only have the cows enabled Jackson’s and Albrecht’s canvas work, they have improved it.
“We’ve become more disciplined painters because of the cows and more adventurous,” Jackson said. “I see Nancy’s work as much stronger now with more intense colors.”
Albrecht and Jackson have learned a lot in a little more than a year. They learned that, although the cow is a shape virtually everyone responds favorably to, it is a challenge as a canvas. “There are those sharp hip bones,” Jackson noted, “and we figure a cow is about 80 square feet of surface to paint. It takes a couple of hours just to do the white coat.”
Experience has taught them which colors do well and which fare poorly outdoors. Jackson’s cow for the city’s project was light colors and got dirty easily. “People literally loved it to death,” she said. “I figure something like 200,000 people rode it.”
She’d go out regularly and touch it up and clean it. She noticed that it was getting dinged up, including one particularly noticeable udder dent. She got an idea. Since the theme of the piece was youth, why not glue jacks to its back — thus discouraging riding. “It turned out to be a terrible idea,” Jackson said, “They took hammers to it to break out the jacks.” She noted that, when New York City took up the cow project last summer, vandalism was a problem there too.
From one commission that called on them to glue something like 800 mementos to a cow, Jackson learned, “I’m a painter, not a gluer.”
They know now how to protect their works from the elements. Cows get a coat of “sunscreen,” ultraviolet protective varnish. Those that will see hard use, like the grouping sent to a playground at the Phoenix Children’s Hospital in Arizona, are mounted on skate bases and herdedover to West Loop Auto Body, where an automotive, clear-coat finish is sprayed, then baked, on.
The two artists have learned they make a good team. “Layne is the design guru,” Albrecht said. “She takes the ideas and makes them visual, pleasing to the eye, electric and meaningful. I paint. I do office work.”
Another thing they’ve learned is now that they’re not exactly starving artists anymore, they have become of interest in the world of lawsuits. A Connecticut company, CowPARADE Holdings Corp., which recently trademarked and owns the name “Cows on Parade,” and the Swiss firm, CowPARADE Holdings AG, the successor firm to the company through which the original three Swiss-made shapes were brought to Chicago in 1999, are threatening to sue each other. Albrecht and Jackson may be entangled in the suit in that the U.S. company is challenging their right to buy from the Swiss and demanding past profits from sales of the cows.
The fact that they have not had a delivery of Swiss cows since September indicates how much the business has drifted from the fury over the 1999 art project. Producing painted cows is now only about half of what Cowpainters does while the consulting aspect of the business grows.
Nonetheless, the cow memories are fond. Jackson mentioned a few:
“We’ve got two naturalistically painted cows on a country estate in New York, a cow atop a mountain in Colorado, a floral cow based on an Andy Warhol design grazing on hay in the foyer of a Florida home, near the guest room in which the Warhol print hangs. There’s `Cowligator,’ a combination cow and alligator in the 151 Bourbon Street Restaurant in Merrionette Park. The Rothstein family in Wilmette has `Travel Cow’ with mementos glued toit of the many trips the father had taken. A Chicago couple has an Elvis imitator cow, and we shipped a naturalistic one to New York City. I don’t know where that one ended up.”
And don’t rule them out of this summer’s Chicago public-art project — even though it is to be of furniture settings. They had a cow reconstructed so it could be sat upon. “It’s called `COW-ch,'” Jackson said.
